Unravelling the "Big Cloth" story

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The Paisley Sisters' home on the Western Isles is now a ruin

BBC Scotland reporter Iain MacDonald takes a look at the fortunes of the Harris Tweed industry.

From the fabric's humble beginnings at the hands of two sisters, it is now about to be used for the interior of a new five star hotel in Glasgow.

If you leave Rodel in the far south of the island of Lewis and Harris and walk up over the hill, you come to the village of Borghasdal.

A wee man may well pop out of one of the houses to quiz you, in that gently insistent Hebridean way, about where you come from and who your people are.

Having had that conversation - you won't really have a choice - then follow the road through the little settlements of Srond and Carminish and you're heading for Leverburgh.

And on the way, beyond the old corrugated iron post office, and the house that proclaims it's a mobile bank, you'll come to the birthplace of Harris Tweed.

Derelict condition

The Clo Mhor - the Big Cloth - began here, thanks to an island aristocrat and two sisters, born on the tiny offshore island of Paabay. The Countess of Dunmore, widow of the Earl of the same title - then the laird round here - paid for and trained Christine and Marion Macleod to produce the cloth, initially for herself, but then for wider sale.

She sent them for training to mills on the mainland and the Macleods were to become known as the Paisley Sisters.

Today there's a plaque in the ground here but the Paisley Sisters' home is a derelict shell looking over the beautiful sound of Harris, with warnings painting on the walls, urging the passer-by to stay away.

At the end of 2006, it looked as if the industry they gave birth to was in a similarly derelict condition.

The tweeds are woven in the home - or more often in a corrugated iron shed at the end of the house - across the islands. For the rest, the machine spinning, the vat dyeing and the general finishing of the product, that is mostly done on a more industrial basis in the mills.

Still, Harris Tweed remained the only fabric in the world that's governed by its own Act of Parliament, with the Orb trade mark the guarantee that what you've just bought really is "hand woven, hand spun and dyed by crofters and cottars in the Outer Hebrides".

Harris gives its name to the cloth, but it is made across the isles

Three years ago, Mackenzie's mill in Stornoway, which by then accounted for most of the industry on the island, was bought by a Yorkshire businessman with the strangely apposite name of Brian Haggas.

But his policy for the future of the industry he virtually owned, lock stock and loom, was to prove controversial in the extreme.

He announced he was only going to make gents' jackets, aimed at the top end of the market, and market the product to those who had "loadsamoney" and those who aspired to.

The timing might have been better of course, but the outcome of that strategy is that Mr Haggas is thought still to have thousands of jackets to sell and in March, Mr Haggas announced he was closing the mill for a year.

But there is a bright silver lining to this doom-laden cloud.

Other people have started to target the markets Mr Haggas had turned his back on. Harris Tweed Hebrides is based in another tweed mill, at Shawbost on the west side of Lewis. Lewis and Harris are actually one land mass, but like to insist they are separate islands, and different people, though you probably don't need to know that.

Fighting back

This week the company, which is chaired by former government minister Brian Wilson, announced it had won the contract to supply 9,000 sq metres of tweed for what is being described as Scotland's most exclusive new hotel, the former Royal Scottish Automobile Club, now to be known as Blythswood Square, Glasgow's first five star hotel.

They're being coy about how much it might be worth, but it's thought to run into six figures.

The Harris Tweed company will meanwhile be confirmed as winning an Outstanding Contribution prize at the Scottish Style Awards in Glasgow's Old Fruitmarket at the end of this month. And they say their order books are bursting.

Meanwhile, home weaver Donald John Mackay, who lives not far from the stunning white beach at Luskentyre in south Harris, has been winning orders from sports manufacturers Nike to provide tweed for a roster of "retro" running shoes and subsequently for shoe company Clarks, apparently for boots.

The industry, then, is fighting back and pretty successfully too.

In just over two years, they have turned an apparently unfashionable product into an international brand once more. That's worth celebrating, and probably will be at the Old Fruitmarket among other places.

And maybe the next move, now the Big Cloth is once more a part of the web and the weave in the west, would be to do something about the Paisley Sisters' former home. History surely owes Harris that.